Ubuntu One Blog

Archive for August, 2010

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

We have some great news to share about Ubuntu One support for Android devices.

Ubuntu One Contacts for Android

We recently released an Android version of the Ubuntu One Contacts sync application. This app will sync your phone address book with your Ubuntu One personal cloud to help keep your digital life together. An Ubuntu One account is required.

Ubuntu One Contacts is based on the existing Funambol application but we’ve made a few enhancements.

You no longer need a custom username and password. Sign in with your standard Ubuntu One username and password (same as your Ubuntu SSO account)

We also added a link to the current Ubuntu One status at the bottom of all pages. This is an area that we update frequently with news about the current status of all Ubuntu One services. It’s a great first place to visit if you notice a problem and are curious if it’s been reported.

As we get closer to Ubuntu 10.10, we’ll release many more updates to the website so stay tuned.

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

I find myself publishing files pretty often using Ubuntu One. In fact my ~/Public folder is now filled with published files so I usually put the file to ~/Public folder, wait for it to upload, request publishing and then get the URL.

The better approach would have been to publish the files automatically but this functionality is not present in the client. Fortunately, Ubuntu One syncdaemon provides a nice DBus interface, so this is extremely easy to program so I decided to go ahead and implement such a service.

Setting up automatic publishing

Download the script from Ubuntu One or branch the bzr tree using bzr branch lp:~rye/+junk/ubuntuone-scripts .

Put the script to some well-known directory and add it to Startup Applications:

Set the command to the path of the script and add the directory which will be used for public files. In my case that is /home/rtg/Projects/ubuntuone-scripts/ubuntuone-publish-service.py /home/rtg/Public

Testing

After the file is put to this directory, it is uploaded to Ubuntu One online storage and marked as published you will receive a notification:

If you decide that you no longer need the file to be published but you might need it in the future you can stop publishing it using nautilus plugin and you will receive a notification as well:

Getting URL

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

A little while back, I hinted at us delivering new features for mobile phones, specifically Android and iPhone. Now that we’re past the initial research, architecture and initial implementation phase, I’d like to share one of the new features we’ll be releasing in Ubuntu 10.10: music streaming.

In Ubuntu 10.04, we released the music store, and to compliment that, we will be allowing you to stream any music you have in your Ubuntu One account to your iPhone or Android mobile phone. This feature will be bundled as part of the paid plan, although we are planning some re-structuring to that, yet to be announced.

We’ve chosen to base this new service on free software, and have picked Subsonic clients as our platform, implementing compatible APIs on our servers.
On the iPhone, Ben Baron, who develops the iSub client for that platform, has decided to open source the code for his application, enabling us to build our iPhone as an open source project. We can’t thank him enough, for enabling that for us, you should try out iSub, it’s an amazing application.

We hope to slowly start opening up the testing of the service before the 10.10 release, but more on that as we make progress.

Monday, August 9th, 2010

A little while back, I hinted at us delivering new features for mobile phones, specifically Android and iPhone. Now that we’re past the initial research, architecture and initial implementation phase, I’d like to share one of the new features we’ll be releasing in Ubuntu 10.10: music streaming.

In Ubuntu 10.04, we released the music store, and to compliment that, we will be allowing you to stream any music you have in your Ubuntu One account to your iPhone or Android mobile phone. This feature will be bundled as part of the paid plan, although we are planning some re-structuring to that, yet to be announced.

We’ve chosen to base this new service on free software, and have picked Subsonic clients as our platform, implementing compatible APIs on our servers.
On the iPhone, Ben Baron, who develops the iSub client for that platform, has decided to open source the code for his application, enabling us to build our iPhone as an open source project. We can’t thank him enough, for enabling that for us, you should try out iSub, it’s an amazing application.

We hope to slowly start opening up the testing of the service before the 10.10 release, but more on that as we make progress.